Men at Lunch: Images are great but platitudes too plentiful in documentary about New York photo

Men at Lunch is the story of a time, a place, a photograph, and the people in that photograph.

The photo shows 11 men, eating their lunch on a beam, more than 800 feet above Manhattan. It was taken on Sept, 20, 1932, and appeared in the New York Herald Tribune on Oct. 2, 1932, with the caption Lunch Atop a Skyscraper. The name of the photographer is unknown. So far, only two of the workers have been identified. And they were building Rockefeller Centre, not the Empire State Building, as some online captions mistakenly claim.

The best parts of Men at Lunch are visual – photos and film footage of New York in the 1930s.

It was great to have a look at the archives of Rockefeller Centre itself, and, better still, to visit the Corbis photo collection, which is kept inside a former mine in Iron Mountain, Pennsylvania. (As someone who does not like rooms without windows, the long tunnels of the Corbis facility would not be my ideal work environment, though.)

The filmmaker, Seán Ó Cualáin, visited Corbis because that’s where the (broken) glass negative of the photo of the lunching ironworkers is kept. That one photo earns the archive more money than any other. Given its fragility, maybe it’s surprising that this negative did not break until 1996. We don’t learn how it was broken, or who broke it. All I can say is, glad it wasn’t me!

(A New York street vendor says that the image is his best seller, too. Something tells me that he’s not paying any royalties to Corbis. He says that customers often claim that one of the men in the photo is their grandfather.)

Many of today’s ironworkers say that poster versions of the photo hang in their homes, and in the homes of ironworker relatives. One of these men says that he comes from a long line of Irish and “Newfies.”
Montrealers know that many local Mohawks helped to build New York, and other U.S. cities, too. There’s some information about them on a web page of The Smithsonian Institution.
Germans, Scandinavians and Irish did this work, as well. (We don’t see any black or Asian faces in any of the photographs, presumably because of discrimination back then.)

The film owes its existence to that Irish connection, in fact.

An article in the Irish Examiner says that Seán Ó Cualáin and his brother Eamonn saw a copy of Lunch Atop a Skyscraper in a pub in Shanaglish, County Galway, with a note underneath it that read: “As promised, picture of my dad and my uncle, far left and right, Sonny Glynn and Mattie O’Shaughnessy — Pat Glynn.”
They were intrigued, and contacted Pat Glynn, a Boston man of Irish descent.“We went into it with the sole intention of proving that Sonny and Mattie are the men in the picture,” Seán Ó Cualáin told the Irish Examiner.“Within about two weeks, we realised we weren’t going to be able to do that. No work records survived from the construction of the Rockefeller building. The story had to change. We couldn’t prove if it was them or not, but we knew there was still enough in the claim itself, and in the power of the photo, and the history of that time in America.”

New York City skyline in the 1930s, as seen in Men at Lunch.

While watching the film, I learned that the men doing this very dangerous work earned $1.50 an hour, which was considered very good pay at the time. But every year, 2 per cent of New York’s ironworkers would die in accidents and another 2 per cent would be disabled for life. Planners assumed that for every 10 storeys that were built, one worker would lose his life.

The buildings went up very quickly – four or five storeys in one week. “You could watch the city change before your eyes,” says one of the many talking heads in this film.

And therein lies the unfortunate problem with Men at Lunch, which I’d been looking forward to seeing since I first read about it, several months ago.

The silent film era ended decades ago, but that doesn’t mean that every second of a film must be filled with talking or tunes, does it?

There’s a tinkly musical motif repeated so many times in Men at Lunch that I became very tired of it long before the film was over.
It’s my understanding that a film has to be of a certain length to be eligible for various film festival prizes, and I suspect that explains the length of this one. It isn’t a bad film, not at all, but it would have been so much better with a trim. (It seems that a shorter version has aired on PBS.)
There are only so many times we want to hear things like the “iron workers are walking, breathing icons of New York City,” that they were the “motivational poster boys of their day,” and that oldie-but-goody, “work hard and you can achieve anything.”

Unless you’ve just arrived from Mars, you’ve probably heard about the American Dream, the Land of Opportunity, the famous Melting Pot, and Ellis Island. You know that New York is a city of immigrants. Certainly, any American viewer would know it, and even a Martian would only need to hear that once, no need to belabour the point. The film is almost like a citizenship application on the part of the filmmaker.

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